SOLVED: Group Announces EPIC News About The Lost, Legendary 9/11 American Flag

An American flag that was raised by three firefighters amid the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequently lost has been recovered and was scheduled to go on display at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan on Thursday.

The flag was recovered in Washington. How it got there remained a mystery.

The flag’s career as an icon began on the day of the World Trade Center attack, when three firefighters removed it from a yacht moored on the Hudson River and raised it at Ground Zero. Thomas E. Franklin, a photographer for the The Record, a newspaper in northern New Jersey, captured the moment for posterity.

A flag that supposedly was THE flag was flown at Yankee Stadium and on U.S. warships in the Middle East before being returned to City Hall in 2002. It was signed by Gov. George Pataki and Mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg and various other dignitaries. Then someone pointed out that the yacht’s flag had been 3 feet by 5 feet while the autographed one was 5 feet by 8 feet.

Somehow or other, the authentic 9/11 flag had gone missing.

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In late 2014, television writer and thriller novelist Brad Meltzer featured the mystery of the missing flag on the first episode of “Brad Meltzer’s Lost History,” which aired on H2, a History Channel spinoff, on Oct. 31.

Four days later, a man who called himself Brian walked into a fire station in Everett, Washington, carrying a plastic bag containing what he said he believed to be the 9/11 flag, complete with rope and hardware.

Brian claimed to be an ex-Marine who had been deployed in the Middle East and had been given the flag by an employee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who had in turn been given the flag by a 9/11 widow.

The firefighters turned it over to their superiors, and the police began investigating the matter. Efforts to locate Brian have been unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, forensics experts went to work verifying the flag’s authenticity. Bill Schneck, a forensic materials scientist with the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory, said the dust on the flag matched samples collected from other 9/11 materials.

The mixture of concrete, glass fibers plastic, molten metal and asbestos “was like what you would call a fingerprint,” Schneck said.

The History Channel consulted Monica Rosero, who worked on the yacht and who recognized the hardware. She also said the black electrical tape on it was the handiwork of her late husband Carlos, the boat’s engineer.

Shirley B. Dreifus, who with her husband Spiros Kopelakis owned the yacht at the time of the attack, called the flag “the only symbol of hope that day” and said she was saddened that Kopelakis, who died nearly two years ago, had not lived to see its return.

She and Chubb Limited, the insurance company that had paid a claim on the flag, donated it to the museum.

John W. Cutter, retired deputy chief of the New York Police Department and a former member of its criminal intelligence section, doubted Brian’s story about someone receiving the flag from a widow. Flags used at burials normally are not accompanied by rope or hardware, he said.

“This leads me to believe that he received the flag in some other fashion and is afraid to say how he got it,” Cutter said.

So the flag has come home, but the mystery of its disappearance remains.